By Bryan Kay
Staff Reporter
It has been 16-and-a-half years since the brutal murder of 2-year-old James Bulger in Merseyside, England ― a day many Brits of a certain age will probably find hard to forget.
The tragic youngster was abducted by two 10-year-old boys from a busy shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool, led to a railway line, then subjected to a horrific series of attacks, before eventually being murdered.
His horrible death will perhaps be forever embroidered into the social fabric of the United Kingdom, recorded in print and online, and passed down the generations given the unimaginable tenderness of his years and the unthinkable way he was taken from this world.
His killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, then prepubescent but now adults in their mid-20s, will go down in infamy as among the most evil of child killers, and because their time spent behind bars came to an end in 2001, just halfway through their sentences.
The dark, introspecting British film ``Boy A," based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell and first released in 2007, evokes strong reminders of that fateful February 1993 day when the boy was killed, impulses few with memories of the case will likely be able to resist.
But it is not the tragic child, or mother and father left behind, that forms the focus of the film, but the surviving of the two perpetrators and his re-entrance into liberty.
Jack, his newly assumed name, is given a new life, including a job and a room in the council estate house of a middle-aged woman, in the northern city of Manchester after being released from prison at 24. He and a friend murdered a schoolgirl while they were children themselves in London, his accomplice having committed suicide while in detention.
The story plunges Jack into the morns of mundane suburban life: the day-to-grind of a menial packaging house job, weekends out with workmates, dating and then falling in love. Only, Jack is not a run-of-the-mill 20-something; he is a convicted killer with huge psychological baggage. As his journey unfolds, he is confronted with moral dilemmas over his secret past amid his circle of new friends and a girlfriend.
As viewers, we are faced with moral dilemmas of our own. Should killers, child killers in particular, be given a second chance? Can they grow into functional, reformed adults? More than anything else, perhaps, this depicts an image of working class Britain at its worst, one that breeds depravity and then occupies an often-unlikely moral high ground.
Along the way, some of the details in ``Boy A'' are undeniably similar to the Bulger case: that one of the perpetrators, the central character in ``Boy A'' was the tortured one, led astray by the other; the unshakable presence of the tabloid press, baying for the blood of the wrongfully released. It all leads to a stunning if predictable climax.
``Boy A'' was seen at Joongang Cinema in Myeongdong.